Google's New Image Mismatch Penalty Explained by John Heard

If you leverage anti-hot linking strategies or watermarking scripts read
on...Google's New Image Mismatch Penalty Explained —
by John Heard

Google rolled out a new Manual
Action Penalty called Image
MisMatch, which is put in place when an image displays
differently in the search results than it does on the actual page it's located. Sounds like yet another
penalty targeting Web sites leveraging cloaking strategies.

Unfortunately, business owners making an honest attempt to protect their images from hot linking and other
forms of
image theft are also getting hit with this penalty. Within this article we'll explain what exactly triggers this
penalty, how to avoid and finally how to get rid of it if you receive one.

The Day Google Killed Image Referrer Traffic

January, 2013 Google changed image search to no longer show the Web site where it found the
image and switched to only show the image itself out of context. This cut image search
traffic to sites tremendously as click through rates fell through the floor, over 50% in many
cases. In their own defense, many sites like Fanshare.com and Pixabay.com added watermarking
or anti-hot linking techniques to help recover their traffic, and it did help. Those sites saw
a reasonable recovery of their traffic.

Later many sites found that the watermarks also drove down their click through
rates from Image Search, so they discontinued the practice. However anti-hot linking scripts
have been used for many years to prevent image theft with the highest use in the adult
industry. Most of these sites using anti-hot linking methods did it without regard to what
Google thought about the practice - that is until this new penalty.

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